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Living A Life In Crisis

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

I know many people who live in crisis mode. I try not judge, since I was once one of them. Nothing ever got done in my life until the pressure had reached a fever pitch. This behavior enabled a whole lot of other bad habits. It wasn't such a horrible way to live in my bad old party days. It enabled me to stay awake for a week at a time, accomplishing things, that too my mind, were amazing. Creative. Earth shattering even.

I was the life of the party, but the big lie is this; that life was killing me. Not just from the excesses and excuses, but from the continued denial about my mental health. Before the drugs. Before the alcohol. Even before the weird obsessions, I was sick. Those other things were just symptoms. Well, they weren't just symptoms, and that is a story for another time.

I look around at other people living their lives in chaos, and some days I am actually jealous. Like a junky, I crave the chaos. That moving of one crisis to the next is just as addictive as any drug. Hell it didn't even have to be my crisis. I would willingly take up yours. That way the old rage and paranoia would get me all jacked up and productive.

The thing is, I can't go back. The last time I was there, my solutions were absolute ones and insanity was the easiest of them. I am not allowed that luxury anymore, even if I had deserved it in the first place. I also couldn't go back because I recognize the behavior and it's consequences. If I had read this thirty years ago, I would have thought, 'Poor bastard. I am glad I am not like that'.

That's the other part of it. Denial. People in the middle of a crisis driven life can not see that is what they are doing. I had to clean up, then implode, then explode and eventually get hospitalized before I could really make a change. The rebuilding process was a simple one. Eat regularly. Go to bed at the same time every night and get up every morning. Take a shower. Take my meds. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It's sounds monotonous when written down, but it is a good thing. I can take pleasure in the simple things rather than the unproductive grandiosity of building castles in the sky. Not to worry, I didn't give up my dreams, I just learned to work at them instead of playing for them.